During the last few hours reports have been trickling in from Comcast subscribers who are unable to access The Pirate Bay website. Although there is no sign that Comcast is actively blocking user access to the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, something is clearly not in order. The Pirate Bay team have confirmed that they are not the ones who are blocking, and they're investigating the issue.

Although downtime is nothing new for users of the popular BitTorrent site, this time around the connectivity issues appear to be affecting only a select group.

Several tests and numerous user reports reveal that Comcast subscribers from all across the United States are unable to connect to The Pirate Bay. The traceroute from Comcast connections stops at thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se, as it’s supposed to, but The Pirate Bay website does not appear.

Further tests show that the blockade is not DNS related. What is actually causing the issue is uncertain at this point.

Although there’s been a lot of talk about censorship lately, it seems doubtful that this is an intentional blockade on Comcast’s part. That said, there is clearly a mismatch between the Comcast network and The Pirate Bay site which leaves access to the rest of the Internet unaffected.

TorrentFreak spoke to The Pirate Bay team who confirmed that there’s a significant drop in visitors from the U.S. They are currently investigating the issue to see if there’s anything they can do on their end.

When it comes to BitTorrent blocking, Comcast already has quite a reputation. In 2007 TorrentFreak broke the news that Comcast was actively blocking BitTorrent traffic. Comcast initially denied, but later admitted its wrongdoings.

Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking fueled the Net Neutrality debates and eventually resulted in an FCC investigation and various lawsuits. A class action lawsuit was settled by the ISP who reserved a $16 million fund for affected subscribers.

In the light of all the previous legal issues it therefore seems unlikely that Comcast has ventured out on its own to block The Pirate Bay website.

When there’s more information available on the current issues we’ll update this article. In the meantime Comcast users can access the site through Anonymouse and other proxies.

Update: It appears that a subset of Rogers users in Canada have problems accessing the site as well, same with some Optus users in Australia. However, this doesn’t appear to be as widespread as with Comcast.

Update: Jason Livingood, Executive Director Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast told TorrentFreak: “Please note that we do not block websites and we are NOT blocking The Pirate Bay.”

Update:After affecting only Comcast users for about 15 hours, The Pirate Bay seems to be inaccessible pretty much everywhere now. The Pirate Bay team is looking into it. (Update: one webserver died, should be back for most people who are not on Comcast now).